If I had told you six weeks ago that the New Orleans Saints had a chance to go 7-10 this season, you probably would have suggested I get drug tested.
The Saints had just suffered a beatdown to the Los Angeles Rams that left them with just one win in their first nine games.
The Saints hadn’t started a season this bad since 1980, eight years before first-year head coach was even born.
Fast forward six weeks and things have changed.
A 7-10 record is well within reach for the Saints, fresh off back-to-back wins over the top two teams in the NFC South.
One week after knocking off the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Saints followed it up with a comeback victory over the Carolina Panthers to leave those two teams deadlocked atop the division with 7-7 records.
The Saints have been eliminated from the playoffs and are doing their part to eliminate everyone else they can.
“If we can’t go (to the playoffs), I’m going to scoot over on this couch,” said Saints’ defensive end Cam Jordan. “Come sit beside us. … Where we are as a team, we are trying to be everybody’s worst nightmare right now.”
There was a time when the only nightmare was the way the Saints’ season was unfolding.
But the schedule lightened up a bit, the defense hit its stride and Tyler Shough put on his Superman cape to get things turned around. The Saints are 3-2 since that trip to L.A. and have three very winnable games remaining. They host the New York Jets (3-11) Sunday and then end the season with trips to Nashville to face the Tennessee Titans (2-12) and the finale against the Atlanta Falcons (5-9).
A team just a few weeks removed from being in the conversation for having the No. 1 overall draft pick is now all of a sudden in striking distance of winning two more games than it did last season.
A 7-win season would be 2.5 wins more than most everyone from Vegas to me had predicted. The over/under on wins was 4.5 when the season began.
That top five draft pick isn’t quite as important now, especially now that the Saints seem to have found their quarterback of the future. Shough is 3-3 since taking over as the starter.
“How you finish (a season) is always really important,” Moore said last week. “For individuals and for the team collectively, we are creating habits. We are creating habits every day and we are creating an environment to be a really successful program. You do that by winning football games ultimately. That’s what culture is all about.”
Credit to Moore and the veteran leadership on the team for keeping the ship afloat after the rocky start.
Defensive end Chase Young, who was so instrumental in Sunday’s win, recalls the words linebacker Demario Davis gave to the team a few weeks ago.
"How are you going to respond when everything isn’t going your way?" Davis asked them.
Well, they responded with a pair of win.
“I feel like if you look at our team, regardless, we never stop fighting,” Young said.
The Saints now have a chance to end the season on a 5-game winning streak. That would have sounded outlandish a few weeks ago. The last time the Saints won even four games in a row in a season was in 2020, Sean Payton’s last year.
“It’s like what I’ve been saying all season,” Jordan said. “We are a resilient team. You don’t see anybody’s head down.”
A team that had nothing to play for a few weeks ago somehow found something to play for anyway: pride.
“We’re hitting stride,” Jordan said. “But we needed to hit strides a little bit earlier. We don’t have any agenda now. Now our agenda is to wreck other people’s agenda.”
They did that the past two games in a pair of surprise wins.
Going 7-10 would be an even bigger surprise, especially considering where the Saints were six weeks ago.